Google Nexus S is Official, Launching Middle of December

The phone had been rumored for a while, and now Google is formally unveiling the successor to the Nexus One smartphone, the Nexus S. The Nexus S is being made by Samsung and will be similar to the current crop of Galaxy S phones. The Nexus S features a 4 inch, WVGA touchscreen, triband HSPA with AWS support (no mention of HSPA+ though), a five megapixel camera with LED flash, NFC, a gyroscope, 16GB of built-in storage, and 512MB of RAM. Powering everything is a 1GHz Cortex A8 Hummingbird processor which is different from the rumor of a dual-core CPU, but should still be plenty powerful for our uses. Google mentions the Nexus S' "contour display" which means the front is not entirely flat; rather it curves inward slightly to give a unique side profile. The Nexus S will be running stock Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) and will be the new flagship phone for Google since it retired the Nexus One for everyone but developers. If you're wondering what the NFC is doing in there, well, that stands for Near Field Communications and it will let you read other NFC tags. A possible use would be to pay for subway tickets simply by waving your Nexus S over the proper pad.

The Nexus S will be available December 16th from Best Buy in the US for $199 on a two-year contract through T-Mobile or $529 unlocked. In the UK, it can be bought from Carphone Warehouse or Best Buy UK on December 20th.